


even trades

by knockforaloop (tiac), tiac



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Mentor kink, POV Second Person, TLT Kinkmeme, TLT loves a good lesbian pieta, babs is a sex toy now sorry I guess, background Harrow/Ianthe, cytherea is a sadistic stone top and u can't change my mind, dress-up clothes, extremely background Gideon/Harrow, is this... hurt/comfort, lyctors with an age difference, pain play, sexy Avulsion!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 07:41:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29539065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiac/pseuds/knockforaloop, https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiac/pseuds/tiac
Summary: The TLT kinkmeme prompted Cytherea/Ianthe. AU concept: Augustine is the Lyctor who dies at Canaan House, and Cytherea is Ianthe's mentor instead. I loved the spark between them in the final GTN battle scene and wanted to see that play out in a consensual context.Thalergy drain is nausea and gray-out. Thalergy refill is the sore spark of pleasure across flesh rubbed almost raw. Aliveness that hurts. You breathe into it, adjust, sensing your own flushness.
Relationships: Cytherea the First/Ianthe Tridentarius
Comments: 6
Kudos: 28
Collections: TLT Kink Meme





	even trades

**Author's Note:**

  * For [monochrome_agalma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/monochrome_agalma/gifts).



> Content notes: Cytherea and Ianthe call each other "sister" as part of their canon-typical passive aggressive banter but I don't feel this has an incestous vibe. 
> 
> This story is not 100% wholesome but it's not wildly depraved either. Contains consensual, sadistic sex between a mentor and mentee, but is actually mostly about how it's tough to move somewhere new for an intense grad school program where you don't really have friends yet. 

She clothes you in copies of her own dresses, a tumble of seafoam lace down the front of a bodice that is too short on you, waistband cinching your ribcage and hem sweeping your bare thighs. You shiver; it's kept cold in her chambers. She skims the front of your chest to find the nipple, then twists and pulls until you finally make a sound. "Say thank you," she says, returning to the bruise. 

" _Thank you_ , elder sister." You think she enjoys your snotty tone. "I continue to learn from your extracurricular-- demonstrations."

Cytherea huffs a laugh at that, a giggle out of character with her strong grip. " _Extracurricular_. You little brat." 

For you this is an apprenticing. A temporary rhythm. All day she plunges you into the River, watching with those eyes even bluer than your own, as you sputter through metaphysical sewage then strike down planets with your sword. In the afternoons she's absent, crocheting or cooking elaborate lunches or doing sweet fuck all alone in her chambers, for all you know. That's when you train by yourself, and joust with Harrow, when she can stand it; her gold-and-black eyes skitter like beads of water in a hot pan, focusing on nothing in the hallway behind you. And at night Harrow sleeps in your bed like a dog, tension bled away as she cradles that big sword she won't put down. You'll crack her surface, give or take a hundred years-- a victory coming so tangible you can almost close your jaws around it. Except the nights that Cytherea calls you to her quarters. 

It started as an even trade, if anything is even between monsters, one ancient and one still sticky from her bloody birth. You'd met when Gaius dumped you onto the Mithraeum and vanished to make funeral arrangements for the Saint of Patience you had personally held down for Harrow to decapitate. Your fellow brand-new Lyctor still wasn't looking at you, watching her own hands trace her ridiculous sword and mumbling. 

The Seventh Saint was a frail woman propped against the wall, a starless void like all the rest of your new family, this one decorated with a incongruous feathered toque. "So you're to be my charge," she said, and looked at you like a hot meal. The metal forearm braces were a lusterless contrast to her gauzy rainbow cloak. 

Sometimes she lets you touch yourself from the outside while she puts her fingers in you, but mostly she keeps your hands on the table and makes you come clenching around nothing, standing on shaking legs. Cytherea is unrelenting in her pace and pressure, those bony fingers finding a groove along your thighs or ribs or cunt. Once she's taken her first siphon she lays her metal crutches against the table, respectfully, like a dance partner she'll come back to. She's roseate and alert, pink lips pressed in a smirk. She lets you breathe, then raises her hands again for you to lean into. 

After you first broke the twenty-minute barrier in the murder of a planet, she'd hoisted you from the River with a laugh. 

"That was almost adequate. I'm quite proud. You baby," she said, "with your extra life to spare." She caught you around the wrist, tapping your knuckle, then your radial pulse, then the fleshy part of your forearm, suddenly serious. "If you ever shared a sip, it would go far for an old crone like me."

Cytherea is older than you by five years or so-- given the lines on her forehead-- and by infinite time. She dimpled and released you, ready to make it a joke. But you sensed the foothold and pressed back, by instinct. You have always loved to scale a wall. "Show me what you mean, elder sister."

Her birdlike hands returned, this time with fingernails notched carefully over your basilic vein. You lifted your chin, a proud reflex, and Cytherea's fingers lit there upon your carotid pulse. 

The sick thud of the drain took you by surprise-- and then the blooming release of thalergy refilling you, one half-step later, from your infinite secret well. You blinked, hard. An electric aftershock fluttered down your spine, then another. 

"Ah, there it is." Her vivid mouth hung slightly open. "Ask for mercy if you need it."

"No chance," you said, and peeled down your own shirt. 

This is the time of your aloneness. Everything has its lesson, even the vacuum of space. And everything can eventually be conquered, if you can last it out. So, having traded your twin for a passel of _sisters_ who barely notice you, you sink into the solitude like a cold bath, waiting to learn something from it. In some ways Harry is the only real one here-- and she's still zoned out most of the time, eyes drifting past you. When she does deign to put her back into it, your sword practice sessions are their own kind of foreplay. The Emperor's most recent saints trade grunts and barbs in the training rooms as you smash against each other, Babs's precise needle a mosquito next to her heretical longsword. You keep track of her blown-dark eyes, the asymmetrical smile she gives only you. A hook in your gut, not unpleasant. Some day, you're going to marry that girl. 

Now, Cytherea drapes you with the nacreous robe again, tying it loose so you both know it will fall once more from your shoulders. 

After she sips from you, her skin is radiant and smooth. Sometimes you pass thalergy back and forth, like lovers sharing puffs of smoke. It makes you giddy, like a held breath. But the spell passes. This is just sex, and fair exchanges: her hunger, your education. Outside Cytherea's chambers, your footsteps ring over the sanctified, sacrificed dead. You won't be entombed, here or anywhere else in the Nine Houses; your star has just begun to burn.

She likes to take the biggest gulp just as you come-- placing her light fingertips over your chest and pulling thalergy as you tip over, so that you swallow your own double transformation and return back to yourself relaxed and chilly, heartbeat slow. Sometimes you blink in to find yourself cradled in her lap, hand loose inside her delicate claw. Or her hair's soft ringlets brush your scapulae as she bends over your back and strokes the bruise. But mostly you can take it standing. 

Thalergy drain is nausea and gray-out. Thalergy refill is the sore spark of pleasure across flesh rubbed almost raw. Aliveness that hurts. You breathe into it, adjust, sensing your own flushness, the fullness of your potential. The grisly path that brought you here, your future among the white-hot stars. Your mentor's warm smirk. You smile and say, "Thank you."

**Author's Note:**

> This is really just me amusing myself, but in this AU Gideon and Harrow have achieved imperfect Lyctorhood and are cohabiting in Harrow's body, but no one else notices because they're not involved in a plot to kill God. 
> 
> Thanks to [@monochrome_agalma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/monochrome_agalma/) for beta, thanks to [@darkveracity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkveracity) for bratty bottom Ianthe inspo, and thanks to this fandom for making casual use of second-person POV socially acceptable, love y'all. 
> 
> I'm on Twitter at [@knockforaloop](https://twitter.com/knockforaloop), come chat with me about inappropriate uses of Lyctoral healing.


End file.
